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Sex secrets of the Pharaohs are all in the genes

23 November 1996

By Anna Grayson

A TISSUE bank of samples from Egyptian mummies held in museums around the
world could solve the mystery of who fathered the boy Pharaoh Tutankhamen. The
project may also reveal the extent to which the rulers of ancient Egypt indulged
in incest.

The Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Manchester Museum and Medical Service
Corporation International of Arlington, Virginia, will use endoscopes to take
samples of tissue, including blood, muscle and internal organs, from mummies.
Tissue taken from the Pharaohs will be stored in Cairo, as the export of royal
remains is banned. Other tissue samples will be brought to Manchester.

The first project earmarked for the Mummy Tissue Bank will be an
epidemiological study of schistosomiasis in ancient Egypt, to be carried out in
collaboration with St Mary’s Hospital in Manchester, Preston Royal Infirmary and
biologists at the University of Manchester. Eggs of the blood flukes that cause
the disease have been discovered in several mummies, and Rosalie David, keeper
of Egyptology at the Manchester Museum, hopes to work out how the disease waxed
and waned over time. The researchers will use antibodies against the parasite to
detect the flukes’ presence in the samples, and also hope to analyse fluke
genes.

Later, David and her colleagues aim to begin DNA fingerprinting to establish
relationships among Egyptian mummies. One goal is to plot the extent of incest
in various Egyptian dynasties, but the researchers also want to establish how
much the Pharaohs mingled their genes with rest of the population of ancient
Egypt.

The project may even identify Tutankhamen’s father. The mummy of the most
likely contender, the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten, is missing. But Akhenaten is
depicted in later portraits as having a grotesquely distorted body, with a gaunt
face and distended abdomen and thighs. This may have been due to an inherited
disorder called Frohlich’s disease. If Tutankhamen turns out to carry the
Frohlich’s disease gene, it will be very likely that Akhenaten was his
father.